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Kevin Costner’s Black or White is sentimental in a good way. After all, it works in the spirit of Michael Jackson’s 1991 single “Black or White,” the most uncompromised of all uplifting pop songs. Jackson declared “I’m not gonna spend my life being a color!” And when he sang “I ain’t scared of your brother / I ain’t scared of no sheets,” he opposed the antinomies of either ethnic solidarity (Afrocentric “blackness”) or ethnic hostility (Ku Klux Klan–style white supremacy).

Costner applies Jackson’s pop principles to playing the role of Elliot Anderson, a wealthy white Los Angeles lawyer. Elliot’s recent bereavement leaves him as guardian of his biracial granddaughter Eloise (Jillian Estell), which means he already lives America’s blended-nation experience, not the fatuous “post-racial” notion but a reality that confirms Jackson’s dream of unity as memorably shown in the iconographic sequence of his extraordinary “Black or White” music video — still the finest achievement of that genre — that morphed all mankind’s ethnic and sexual physical characteristics……

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For at least the third time, Sir Paul McCartney has teamed up with a young African-American man for a hit. McCartney and Kanye West just released “Only One,” a tribute to West’s deceased mother, on iTunes and West’s website.

“Hello my only one, just like the morning sun,” West sings over the former Beatle’s keyboard vamping. “You’ll keep on rising ’til the sky knows your name.”

A somewhat mystical statement issued with the song described what happened when the Walrus and Yeezus teamed up.

“Kanye sat there with his family, holding his daughter North on his lap, and listened to his vocals, singing, ‘Hello, my only one,'” a statement reported by Rolling Stone read. “And in that moment, not only could he not recall having sung those words, but he realized that perhaps the words had never really come from him. The process of artistic creation is one that does not involve thinking, but often channeling. And he understood in that moment that his late mother, Dr. Donda West, who was also his mentor, confidante, and best friend, had spoken through him that day.”

This is arguably the first of McCartney’s duets with young black men not infused with racial baggage, overt or encoded. First, there was “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder, released in 1982. Key question: “Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony side by side on my piano keyboard —oh lord, why don’t we?”

The following year saw the release of “Say, Say, Say,” McCartney’s duet with Michael Jackson — the video for which, some say, referenced minstrel shows.

One academic thought McCartney and Jackson toyed with blackface without taking it on.

“The sequences of ‘Say, Say, Say’ will initially dismay anyone concerned with the fate of people’s culture,” wrote Smith professor W.T. Lhamon in “Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.” “What a loss that the whole cycle of blackface performance should funnel down to these capers in a cross-racial attraction played out among stars ashamed to utter its name aloud in public?”

Though “Only One” is not about race, McCartney’s alliance with West puts him in the studio with a performer whose provocative take on racial politics seems part of a different universe than those of previous collaborators Wonder and Jackson. McCartney, 72, can’t be accused of using young black performers to stay relevant. Even more than Elvis Presley or bandmate John Lennon, the man is arguably one of the most influential performers in the history of pop music, and need not polish his legacy.

“Hanging out with Justin Bieber is much cooler than being the type of teen boy who has a bunch of reptiles in his bedroom.”

“Snakes are weird and not actually that cool, and owning them as an adult male is a surefire way to make yourself intensely unfuckable.”

“No girls are going to be impressed by a cage of old anaconda skin.”

“Posting leg press videos online is inherently uncool for a number of reasons.”

“The only people impressed by such videos are fellow macho gym rats, who are in the running for worst group of humans on Earth.”

“Prince Jackson’s intense lameness is, of course, understandable.”

“Prince Jackson now has a black truck perched up on enormous ‘I believe in the sovereignty of the confederacy’ wheels, with the Money Team logo plastered all over it. Imagine parking that in your high school parking lot. Not cool.”

Yeah, guys, let’s keep telling kids that you have to be “cool” by everyone’s respective standards no matter how diverse and contradictory everyone’s respective standards are! Snakes are dumb and they won’t get you laid, because the point of life for men should be to fuck women! Exercise is dumb! I don’t like this kid’s car, so I’m gonna mock him for it! Yeah! We’re grown adults!

JESUS CHRIST, MAN.

I know that the Gawker/Kinja network is pretty huge and has a diverse staff on diverse blogs with diverse messaging, but one of the things I love about a site like, for instance, Jezebel is that their anti-bullyingstance is prettyunequivocal, and they criticize bullies and defenders of bullies regularly. Same goes for io9, which frequently publishes stories on bullying in the context of geek and nerd culture, pop culture, movies, comic books, and sci-fi. Lifehacker has posted stories about adult bulllying at work and in parenting. The fact that a sister site is actively engaging in bullying a 17-year-old for doing regular 17-year-old stuff, no matter how wealthy and well-connected that 17-year-old happens to be, is disheartening.

And yeah, Defamer is a celebrity gossip blog, but isn’t there a line? I mean, I’ll take shots at James Franco (while alternating with admiration ranging from reluctant to enthusiastic), but at least he’s a grown man.

Oh, and by the way, having an anaconda is f****** cool. It’s a motherf****** anaconda.

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As the Black Lives Matter movement grew in reaction to the lack of indictments in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, Michael Jackson’s 1995 song “They Don’t Care About Us” was resurrected at the grass roots level in many cities including Ferguson, New York, and California.

“They Don’t Care About Us” was denounced by The New York Times even before its release, and did not reach much of its intended audience because the controversy caused by the New York Times article would go on to overshadow the song itself. Radio stations were reluctant to play it and one of the short films Jackson created for the song was banned in the U.S.

All Jackson’s frustrations seem to be on display in this raw and angry performance. Behold:

The album cover for Michael Jackson’s album Dangerous was painted by American pop-surrealist artist Mark Ryden. In it, he depicts a world in which the boundaries between human and animal, living and dead, whole and part, and celestial and terrestrial have been crossed and fused.

Surrealist painters like Ryden often aim to collapse such categories – to reconcile, in their art, what seems to be irreconcilable in life. But actually, this boundary-crossing doeshappen in life – increasingly so – and corresponds to what some have called posthumanism.

Cary Wolfe, an English Professor and author of the book What is Posthumanism, writes that we are “fundamentally prosthetic creatures,” that we rely on entities outside the self – other humans, animals, technology – in order to function and thrive.

In other words: the boundaries of our bodies and intellect are not as firm and finite as we want to believe.

Posthumanism also argues for the dismantling of the hierarchy that puts humans – largely because of our ability to “reason” – above other forms of life and technology.

Both of these ideas were central to Michael Jackson’s life and art.

It’s somewhat surprising that so few have considered him through this lens; instead, many have simply labeled him as weird or eccentric.

Yet Jackson’s entire career was defined by his rejection of normal boundaries. This includes not only the most obvious of these (race and gender) but also generational barriers, the limits of his physical body, and divisions among real and fictional species – not to mention the seamless way he could fuse artistic genres.

Jackson celebrated the prosthetic idea of the human in a number of ways. For example, through plastic surgery, cosmetic procedures, make-up, hair styles and costumes, he asks us not only to reconsider gender binaries (that’s the relatively easy part), but to question prevailing ideas about aesthetic beauty and what can be called “normal.” Our appearances are all products of outside intervention (even face creams and nail files count); Jackson’s extreme modifications could be thought of as a commentary on this.

Fictional boundary-crossing was also a characteristic of his artistic practice – where, at various points, he presented himself as a werewolf, a zombie, and a panther. In the film Moonwalker he morphs into a spaceship; in Ghosts, he becomes a dancing skeleton, a grotesque monster, and a gigantic face that blocks a doorway.

Ghosts, in fact, is a film in which he addresses the perception that he is a “freak” and “abnormal” directly. It’s remarkable that so much of his morphing in this film is focused on his face – an object of constant scrutiny and derision in the media.

(In Ghosts, Jackson directly confronts his critics. Who has the authority to declare what is normal, and what is not?)

In both his life and his art, he held out his body as a work in progress, fully open to and trusting in limitless experimentation. There’s quite a long tradition of artists who have engaged in body modification as a means through which to test the limits of the flesh, like Orlan and Stelarc.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Jackson’s physical changes was the lightening of his skin. We should keep in mind that this was the result of the skin disease vitiligo. It’s thought, erroneously, that his skin color simply got lighter, but it actually fluctuated – so much so that his intent was certainly far from wanting to “be” white, as many have concluded.

Instead, it’s possible that vitiligo – painful as it must have been for him – served as an opportunity to start a conversation about race and skin color. He wanted to challenge the idea of race as fixed or linked to biology, rather than socially constructed.

Jackson’s boundary-pushing extended to his notion of family, which can be described as a sort of “queer kinship.” This has nothing to do with sexual orientation, but with how he challenged normative ideas about what constitutes family. His family included animals (Bubbles the chimp, yes, but also Muscles the snake and Louis the llama). It included children (Jackson could still play like a child, with children, when he was an adult, testing ideas about the normal, linear progression from childhood to adulthood). It included older Hollywood starlets, like Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli (again breaking the boundaries of normative generational affiliation); and it included Frank Cascio’s middle-class family from New Jersey, which Jackson adopted as his own, regularly showing up and spending time at their home, where he vacuumed and made beds with Cascio’s mother.

Much of this has been viewed as pathological because it’s a way of building family that does not conform; it crosses boundaries not normally crossed.

This makes many people uncomfortable.

But Jackson’s vision of the body and of kinship were actually forward-looking, a kind of reaching beyond societal norms that is often celebrated in other artists and activists, but still viewed with great suspicion in Jackson’s case. Elsewhere, I have argued that this is because Jackson crossed so many boundaries simultaneously. It was the combination of social transgressions that caused people to fear – rather than celebrate – his difference.

It was also that he truly lived these transgressions: there was nothing to mitigate Jackson’s differences. When other mainstream artists, like Lady Gaga, transgress boundaries on stage, the impact is often lessened by their private lives, which conform to societal norms.

In a 1985 essay about Michael Jackson, James Baldwin wrote that “freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.”

Happy Anniversary to the Dangerous album! On this day in 1991 Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” album was released. Hundreds of fans lined up at stores nationwide to buy it on the first day.

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Elvis is back in the building, sort of. Authentic Brands Group, which manages Elvis’ estate, and digital production company Pulse Evolution will bring the King back to life as a hologram. The companies plan to have Elvis shake, rattle and roll in live shows, commercials and movies.

Since digital Elvis will involve 11,500 moving parts, Authentic Brands Group CEO Jamie Salter said he won’t be available for projects until spring 2015 or live performances until fall 2015. But, Salter hinted that the King has a commercial deal with a Fortune 500 company. He’s also is in talks for four-night-a-week residencies in Las Vegas and Macau, and may even do special performances with a hologram Michael Jackson in the later location.

“We want you to go to the show and say, ‘Wow, oh my God! I saw Elvis 30, 40 years ago, and this is exactly the same thing,’” Salter said.

Any hologram deals will have to go through the family’s final approval before being inked, but both Pricilla and Lisa Marie are completely behind using the technology, according to Salter. They’ve supported posthumous performances in the past, including when Lisa Marie sang a duet of Daddy Don’t Cry with Elvis in 1997 that used the original vocals and a video featuring her and her father.

Consultant David Deal said performances generate the most money for musicians today, and a hologram in the repertoire may significantly increase revenue for the deceased. It’s the perfect way to capture the stage charisma these artists were known for and to connect with a visual generation. “I think the only thing that needs to be in place is that the names have to be strong brands with a strong global following,” he said.

Gartner’s Andrew Frank added there’s tons of money in celebrity endorsements, considering that advertising budgets are on the rise. As the hologram technology gets better, he expects that we’ll see these digital counterparts directly interacting with people, including having them sing a personalized song or talk to a consumer on behalf of a brand.

The technology may even open doors for the living, argued Forrester senior analyst Anthony Mullen. Artists could virtually perform in multiple places simultaneously, solving a distribution problem similar to how MP3s have spread music faster than CDs and vinyl records.

Then again, musicians may want to read their contracts more carefully, he pointed out. This could mean the music industry may begin to negotiate for after-death digital image ownership while the artist is still breathing. “People talk about musicians selling their souls to the devil when they sign a deal with the record label. This could be a posthumous issue if today’s musicians agree to it,” Mullen said.

Mullen is also concerned that these singer spokespeople will be made to talk about products they never tried or endorse politicians they never would have voted for, while Frank is worried about fans accepting posthumous declarations of support. “We’re pushing the envelope for how much synthetic personality people are willing to go for,” Frank admitted.

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If video really did kill the radio star, MTV may have in turn killed its own creation: the video. For years, of course, the network has seemingly been video-phobic, devoting nearly all of its time to reality shows, scripted dramas and other programs that beg the question of why the letter “M” still appears in its name. Once a year, though, MTV remembers that videos still exist (even if they air primarily on other cable networks and internet sites) and celebrates them.

But if 2014’s show is any indication, the party is over.

The Video Music Awards have become a halfhearted, one-dimensional, and quite frankly inexplicable use of airtime, and in the post-TRL years have become about as relevant and vital as the music video itself. Once an important date on every celebrity’s calendar, the VMA broadcast has outgrown its purpose. TruTV doesn’t blow the cobwebs off of old Court TV shows once a year, so why does MTV continue pretending to care about its legacy by holding an event that celebrates the videos it no longer even shows? Here are five reasons why, as its 2014 broadcast showed, the Video Music Awards no longer matter.

1. Lack of interest. MTV’s biggest night of the year kicked off with a high-octane performance by Nicki Minaj that featured a lot of booty-shaking, crotch-grabbing and floor-grinding, but perhaps more shocking than any of that — because let’s face it, what part of that hasn’t been done on the VMAs before? — was the wide shot that revealed a large number of empty seats in the Forum’s lower level. True, some fans were still filtering in from outside when the show started, but the fact that they were in no rush to get to their seats only shows how missable this show has become, even for live attendees. Plus, the Forum was hardly a sellout — the day before the show, plenty of seats were still available through Ticketmaster, including entire rows. Even MTV itself seemed to not care that much — as soon as the live show had ended, the network immediately showed it again. No post-show interviews, no analysis of the winners, nothing. The next day, entertainment giant TMZ had hardly any VMA coverage that didn’t involve a pre-party shooting that had occurred the night before.

2. Lack of diversity. Among the biggest knocks on MTV’s early years was that, until Michael Jackson broke its unspoken color barrier with “Billie Jean,” the network was almost exclusively a celebration of rock music. In 2014, the closest that the VMA broadcast came to the network’s flagship genre was what it teased as “a rockin’ performance” from Australian boy band 5 Seconds of Summer, which turned out to pretty much be a ballad that happened to feature a couple of guitars. Still, they should be commended for at least playing something — other than Maroon 5 and Usher (who briefly held a bass that he may or may not have actually even been playing), none of the night’s performers even touched an instrument. On a night when current or former judges from The Voice, American Idol, and The X Factor appeared as presenters or performers, MTV showed that the only type of musician that still matters is the female pop vocalist who can sing while backed by a prerecorded track and scores of dancers.

3. Lack of credibility. The only thing weaker than the field of nominees in some categories were the winners themselves. Drake picked up a Moonman for Best Hip Hop Video for “Hold On (We’re Going Home),” a song that features no rapping and, since the show doesn’t offer an award for R&B videos, was probably better suited for inclusion in the Pop category. (See number one above for why Drake didn’t even bother showing up to accept his award, despite having a four-day hole in his tour schedule.) Best Rock Video, meanwhile, went not to a legitimate rock nominee like Linkin Park or the Black Keys, but rather to Lorde’s “Royals,” which is the 2014 equivalent of Jethro Tull defeating Metallica for the Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance. And the Artist To Watch trophy, as voted on by fans — at least those in the nation’s time zones that saw the show live — went to Fifth Harmony, a Simon Cowell creation that, based on the response by the crowd inside the Forum every time the award’s nominees were shown, were only a fraction as popular as fellow nominees 5 Seconds of Summer or Sam Smith.

4. Lack of celebrity. The Video Music Awards used to be a huge event that drew not only the biggest names in music, but also hip, young stars from film, TV, standup comedy and sports. In 2014, among the non-music stars who appeared on stage were nearly 40-year-old comic Chelsea Handler and nearly 60-year-old actor Jeff Daniels. Sure, they tried to shoehorn Robin Williams into the show, but his tribute segment was so arbitrary and awkward, it might as well have not been part of the broadcast at all. Hey MTV, want to pull in more TV stars? Don’t hold your broadcast the night before the Emmys.

5. Lack of purpose. Short of serving as a glorified twerk-off, what did the 2014 Video Music Awards actually contribute to popular music? Is anyone discussing the show’s winners? (Is anyone discussing the show at all?) Self-promotion was a big part of the evening: presenters Jason Derulo and Demi Lovato used their stage time to mention their own upcoming concert tours while introducing Maroon 5; Miley Cyrus, meanwhile, won the once-coveted Video Of The Year award for “Wrecking Ball,” and allotted her acceptance-speech time to someone who spoke about homelessness, which was admirable… until he got to the part about having to go to Miley’s Facebook page for more information.

Celebrating music videos should have been the purpose of the show, but Beyonce won the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award — named for a guy who not only carved out a spot for African-American musicians on MTV, but also revolutionized the music video itself — and gave a nearly 20-minute concert, yet made no mention of the videos that won her the award to begin with. Worse, “Single Ladies” — the song that served as the basis for what Kanye West infamously proclaimed during the 2009 VMAs as “one of the best videos of all time” — wasn’t even part of her medley of hits.

If MTV were to set aside even an hour or two of its daily schedule for airing videos, the Video Music Awards might still have a chance. The landscape has changed, however, and while there is still a need for a fun music-awards show that can balance the uptight Grammys broadcast, the VMAs are no longer it.

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“He Raised Me Right”

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“He’s a high tenor with a three-and-a-half octave range. He goes from basso low E up to G and A-Flat above high C. A lot of people think its falsetto, but it’s not. It’s all connected, which is remarkable. During his vocal exercises he would put his arms up in the air and would start spinning while holding a note. I asked him why he was doing that, and he said ‘I may have to do it on stage, so I want to make sure it’s possible.’ I’d never seen anything like that before. I thought maybe I should stop him so he can concentrate on his voice now, and dance later. But I figured if he can do it, let him do it.” — Seth Riggs on Michael Jackson

“I pray that my children will give me the benefit of the doubt. That they will say to themselves: “Our daddy did the best he could, given the unique circumstances that he faced. He may not have been perfect, but he was a warm and decent man, who tried to give us all the love in the world… I hope that they will always focus on the positive things, on the sacrifices I willingly made for them, and not criticize the things they had to give up, or the errors I’ve made, and will certainly continue to make, in raising them. For we have all been someone’s child, and we know that despite the very best of plans and efforts, mistakes will always occur. That’s just being human.“ Michael Jackson – Oxford Speech 2001

“I’ve seen lawyers who don’t represent me and spokespeople who do not know me speaking for me. These characters always seem to surface with dreadful allegations just as another project, an album, a video is being released.” ~ Michael Jackson, November 18, 2003

♫ I Just Want A Touch And Kiss…Cause You Give Me Butterflies, Michael!♫

Michael Jackson: Portrait of Brillant Artistry ~ “I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, “I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work.” And that’s how I feel. I give my all to my work. I want it to just live.”